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Thursday, August 27, 2015

Ellie Bothwell, International and rankings reporter at Times Higher Education introduces our four ‘innovation indicators’ and reveals
the strongest performers as we visualise a new ranking based on
university-industry collaboration.

A cloak with the magical power to make things under it invisible?
Authors have fantasised about the possibilities of such a garment for
centuries, but in 2006 scientists declared that fiction had become
reality with the invention of a device that makes objects disappear – at
least when viewed in the microwave spectrum. Crafted from synthetic
“metamaterials”, the cape is the result of a collaboration between
scientists at Duke University, Imperial College London and Sensormetrix,
a California-based company that develops technology for governmental
and defence clients. As the technology advances, scientists say that it
could be used in military operations, to disguise vehicles, for example.
David Smith, the James B. Duke professor of electrical and computer
engineering at Duke, says Sensormetrix was instrumental in the financing
and construction of the cloak sample.

Such university-industry partnerships are increasingly common as
higher education institutions around the world seek to enhance their
research, find new applications for their work and boost revenues.

In the UK, interactions between universities and the economy
increased in volume by 10 per cent between 2012-13 and 2013-14 through
activities such as collaborative and contract research, consultancy and
intellectual property income. Figures released by the Higher Education Funding Council for England last month suggest that the worth of these partnerships grew by £300 million to £3.9 billion during the same period.

According to Robert Tijssen, chair of science and innovation studies
at Leiden University in the Netherlands, alongside societal engagement,
“university-industry connectivity is now the third mission of a
university, next to teaching and training and research”.

Data published by Times Higher Education this week in
collaboration with Elsevier aim to shed new light on the world of
university innovations and inventions by revealing which institutions
show the strongest performance across four indicators: the ratio of
papers co-authored with industry, the proportion of papers cited by
patents, the quantity of research income from industry and the
proportion of research income from industry.

Many of the institutions that perform well have not featured prominently, or at all, in Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings because they do not have breadth of research or teaching. However, they are exceptional within a specific field.

Across the indicators, the US and China dominate, with nine and 10
institutions respectively in our tables. Only one UK institution – the
Institute of Cancer Research – features.

China’s Southwest Petroleum University has the highest percentage of
papers co-authored with industry while the US’ Scripps Research
Institute, which conducts biomedical research, produces the highest
proportion of papers that have been cited by patents. Ludwig Maximilian
University of Munich, one of Germany’s oldest universities, claims the
largest quantity of research income from industry, and the Siberian
State University of Geosystems and Technologies has the highest
proportion of income from industry sources.Read more...

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Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.